Prepared Remarks of Attorney General

Last week, men and women from state, local, and federal law enforcementcompleted Operation Wildfire — a massive, coordinated, nationwide operation tofight the deadly scourge of methamphetamine.

I am pleased to be here today – joined by Karen Tandy, Administrator of the DEA,

and McGregor Scott, chairman of the U.S. Attorneys Methamphetamine WorkingGroup – to discuss the results of this operation.

Before doing so, I want to tell the story of a one-year-old infant named Chelton,because behind the numbers today are individual stories of those we are trying tohelp.

As many of you know, meth is highly addictive. It is easy and cheap to produce.And for too many children in too many communities, meth leads to victimization,abuse, and neglect.

Chelton’s parents were meth cookers. One day his father was cooking meth andspilled a coffee pot filled with fuel onto a Coleman burner. The flame ignited a flashfire. The house was filled with the toxic chemicals for meth cooking, so Chelton’sparents grabbed his five-year-old brother and ran out of the home.

As fire quickly spread, Chelton was asleep upstairs. His parents soon realizedChelton was still in the house. The father got a ladder and managed to rescue theboy from the second story.

But Chelton had already been severely burned over 30 percent of his body, and hehad sustained serious internal injuries. For several months Chelton struggled to live,but he eventually died of his injuries.His parents did not bother to attend Chelton’s funeral or burial. Instead, theybecame fugitives.

For the meth-cooking, meth-using parents, the little boy’s death meant little. Whenlaw enforcement located Chelton’s fugitive parents, the mother and father werestocking up on the precursor chemicals to build a new meth lab.

For our brave men and women in law enforcement, the tragic story of meth isn’tlimited to the addiction and decline of meth users or the greed of meth cookers. It isthe story of young lives lost and dreams and potential destroyed.

As a father of young children and as the chief law enforcement officer of the UnitedStates, I am concerned about the scourge of meth. And Federal law enforcement andour U.S. Attorneys, in conjunction with our state and local partners, have beenworking valiantly to combat this problem. Over the last three years alone, lawenforcement has seized, on average, 45 small toxic meth labs or dumpsites each dayacross America.

In Operation Wildfire, the Drug Enforcement Administration led a combined law

enforcement effort that attacked meth in 200 cities across the United States.

As a result of Wildfire, we arrested 427 people. We seized 208 pounds of

methamphetamine. We took 524 pounds of precursor chemicals off the street. That’smore than 200,000 tablets of pseudoephedrine, 158 kilograms of pseudoephedrinepowder, and more than 220,860 tablets of ephedrine – enough to provide 284,000people with a hit of meth.

In each of these busts, in every one of these cities, the men and women of lawenforcement put their lives—and their hearts —on the line. As the sad story ofChelton shows, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Operation Wildfire orto fully quantify what it means in terms of lives saved and children protected.

It was only two weeks ago that Director John Walters of the Office of NationalDrug Control Policy; HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt; and I traveled to Nashville,Tennessee to discuss this Administration’s nationwide plan for attacking meth.

At the Department of Justice we are focused primarily on enforcement and today,

we’re seeing the results of that law enforcement strategy.

Earlier this year, Administrator Tandy declared meth a top priority for the DEA’sMobile Enforcement Teams. The DEA commits more than $145 million per year tocombat meth.

The U.S. Attorneys Methamphetamine Working Group has been working to developeffective strategies with members of Congress and state and local officials.As part of our ongoing and expanding efforts, yesterday I spoke again withMexico’s attorney general, Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, about working more closely tostem the tide of meth coming from Mexico.

We are making more arrests, there are more prosecutions. But our enforcementsuccess depends on our local, state, and international friends and allies. I want tothank all the men and women of law enforcement who took part in OperationWildfire.

At the Department of Justice, we understand that the cause of justice is only as

strong as the bonds within the justice community. And as we strengthen those bondswe do so knowing we strengthen the hope and opportunity in America.